My copy was supplied for review; spoilers follow I reviewed Julian Payne's previous work Harvest, co-written with partner Zoe Elkins, a few years ago for Horrified magazine. I said then that I looked forward to seeing what they'd do next. I have my answer here, in this gorgeous - and sizeable - graphic novel by … Continue reading Review: “What The Tide Reveals” by Julian Payne (2025)
I love Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu1). It's a monumental work, which I'm not going to attempt to summarise here, set in late 19th & early 20th century France, largely within the milieu of the Parisian upper classes, dealing primarily with time and memory but also adolescence, … Continue reading A month of not reading Proust
My copy was supplied for review. Warning: spoilers ahead Life is good for Jimmy Cochran. He’s a freelance journalist, investigating supernatural stories for a local paper in New York, is a successful comic illustrator, lives in an apartment overlooking Central Park, and in Sophia, has a fuck-buddy who’s into a bit of BDSM. Yep, all … Continue reading Review: “The Last Breath Before Death” by Alan Golbourn (2024)
Earlier this year I happened across the 1980 Asterix annual in a charity shop; a book whose existence I was entirely unaware of. It was evidently a one-off, and provides an introduction to many of the long-running French comic series’ characters, along with heavily abridged versions of some of the stories, and the usual puzzles … Continue reading Asterix!
FEAR appeared at exactly the right time to fill a gap in the market. Although there were similarly-glossy genre magazines (Starburst, Fangoria, Samhain) their focus was on film whereas FEAR recognised there was demand for a magazine that covered horror fiction1. As an avid reader of ZZAP!64 in the mid-80s, for their publishers Newsfield to … Continue reading Horror Rewind #12 – ‘FEAR’ magazine # 2, Sep/Oct 1988
I wrote here (and more pertinently here) about maps in fantasy books, and for no justifiable reason I want to look at the ways in which the nature of Clive Barker's work is largely resistant to cartography. When we think of fantasy maps we tend to think of Christopher Tolkien's classic Middle Earth one (although … Continue reading The Unmappability of Clive Barker
In the mid 90s - the exact date is relevant, as we'll soon see - one of my friends gave me a mixtape. He, my cousin and I swapped records all the time: we were into the blossoming forms of electronica that the early 90s gave birth to, and every other week it seemed a … Continue reading Ambient search – help needed
In 2025 I'm keeping track of all the books I read, as I did in 2019 and 2020.
How does Star Wars begin again? Ah yes: “Another galaxy, another time.” That’s right. Wait – what? Star Wars geeks among you already know that the above is true – from a certain point of view. That’s because the sentence comes from Alan Dean Foster’s 1976 novelisation, published under George Lucas’s name. It came out … Continue reading The joy of film novelisations
The book's subtitle puts it better: Ghost Movies. But even that's deceptive. In this 260-page anthology, editor Peter Haining (whose many other spooky collections were familiar to me as a teenager) traces the history of the ghost story onscreen through the works of fiction that inspired such classic films as Night of the Demon, Don't … Continue reading Horror Rewind #11 – “Classics of the Supernatural” (ed. Peter Haining) (1995)
Into the Gyre 